


SHOW SOME MERCY

by lackingsoy



Category: Code Geass
Genre: ......i have no shame whatsoever goodbye, Childhood Promises, Gen, Imperialism, M/M, Military Background, Oppression, Settler Colonialism, Trauma, [squints at my google drive] why are there so many of youu, mutuality!!!, open up your wallets and donate 2 asian folx :], suzaku's suicidal ideation, white saviorism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-24 05:34:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30067446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lackingsoy/pseuds/lackingsoy
Summary: Lelouch smooths back your bangs, palm soothing over your forehead, and tells you: use your power for me, then, and for Nunnally, and I'll promise you the same.
Relationships: Kururugi Suzaku/Lelouch Lamperouge | Lelouch vi Britannia
Comments: 6
Kudos: 14





	SHOW SOME MERCY

You are ten when you make your first dead body. It's very peculiar, the way your father travels to the ground. First to his knees, clutching his opened gut with disbelieving fingers, then the rest of him tumbling down, face sinking into the tatami mats. Soaking them with a low wooden groan. Like. Like something splintering, like the pedestal finally cracked. Like finally coming free from a wound, but becoming the wound itself. You don't scream; you don't touch the subject of your crime. You run and take the knife with you. You wash off the blood in the river and smear your fingers into the grass and tear off your clothes--but you taste your father between your teeth, ashen and impossible to ignore. Tar, black, and despicable.

You remember: your father, noting with disinterest that the Britannian bargaining chips were rather useless now, so he might as well smother Lelouch in his bed and ship Nunnally off to a brothel.

You wonder, hysterically: was that a valid motivation to gut your father where he stood? What, son of Japan? What son? And Japan--

You are a child, Lelouch tells you. Lelouch takes your hand and tells you to come inside, you'll get sick, idiot, Nunnally was worried and so was I. 

You can't take it back. You can't.

Lelouch smooths back your bangs, palm soothing over your forehead, and tells you: use your power for me, then, and for Nunnally, and I'll promise you the same.

(War does not care if you have small hands, so long as you can still curl your fingers around the hilt of a blade or the grip of a handgun. It is within its trenches and fields and polluted skies that you learn the indifference of empires and its litter of dead bodies, soldiers and citizens and whatever--where people of color aren’t people, aren’t children or anything remotely human, just vessels, just take, take. Take. You learn what conquerors call holy. And you learn the most important: that war steals and robs and violates, and being colonized means you will lose and lose and lose.)

You don't see Lelouch and Nunnally again, and you stop speaking your mother language. You are left alone, a lone body that hasn't fallen, hasn’t yet been felled, and the darkness of your muddled sleep coos to you in an ancient, stinging Japanese. A mistake--you. You have to fix this, it says. You have a duty.

Its promise of death grows offshoots with steel nails that catch on your skin. There’s a knife in your hands. You are red-knuckled. You are my son, the Japanese face of your father says, a tectonic plate smashing into the skies, as if in rendition of Mt. Fuji.

There's no whiteness in your skin. You are a patricidal child with nothing left.

Except. Except: Lelouch's eyes, cut from the pit and vehement, face screwed up in determination, saying: I'll do it. 

They let you enlist because you are your Father's son. Your name is a preemptive strike. You can only take so many hits before you imagine a fist around your pulse point and let it leash you.

They put you in their ranks because Britannia likes its prizes. Has an acquired taste for extinction events. You are a brown boy that they have collected and collared, free only to be commanded. 

They command you to war. 

(War; you are its product and paradox, its dutiful machine. You are the despair and blood of quelled clans and you are the undead name of the Kururugi mantle. You are the last of your kind. You are the knife in your hand.

You are a child.)

You are older when you think of Lelouch. Fourteen or fifteen or somewhere in between, you stopped counting birthdays and marked time by the hour, the minute, by the pulse of the target forever on your back. You wonder if he's gotten any taller. Smarter. Sharper. You hope his eyes haven't changed. You wonder if you will see him again, older and hardened, but with gentle hands and an exasperated gaze that makes you want to hold him up to the sun and laugh as he shouts. 

You walk into your biannual physical with a dozen burn scars that hadn't been there half a year ago. The doctor doesn't ask, just hands you a bottle filled with painkillers and tells you how much you need to take to avoid a lethal dose. You thank them. You leave.

You think of Lelouch, Nunnally, summers spent in the sea, and fires in the dark.

You are seventeen when you meet him again. He is young, eyes darker and brighter than you remember, his hands long over your arms. He wants to know how you are alive, but you can't say, you don't know. Silence has been stuck in your throat for years. _It’s me,_ you finally say in English, but he doesn’t believe you, and neither do you.

Then there's a girl, then there's a gun, and then it's you staring down the miserable eye of destiny.

Happy birthday, you think. 

You wake up, obviously, because the universe could care less about what you want, and your vicious disappointment gives you a headache. Aw, the noble named Lloyd says: Pity, pity, boo-hoo. Heaven's a bit full right now, with Britannia expanding their empire and formalizing their hold over the world and all. Oops! Apologies, I meant Hell. You know, the place where soldiers go.

But I don't want to kill, you say. Comes with the job, Lloyd sing-songs, and hands you Lancelot's USB key. Somebody makes you rice balls with purple jam as an apology.

You are a Japanese lapdog for the Britannian hierarchy, a private in their vast army, protector of its right to glory and grandeur. And you have just taken a bullet for its banished prince. You do not know this; it is too soon, and you are always too late.

(The inch of scar tissue scabbed raw and pink over your abdomen’s middle is your first sacrificial act as Lelouch vi Britannia's knight, and by the time you realize this, you can't take it back. Again, no matter how desperately you wish it: no, you will not have died, and no: Lelouch will not have either.) 

You have been a scapegoat more than once for a country that wants no less than the calcium of your bones, and one of its princesses wants something more. 

So this is his sister, you think. You hand Euphemia li Britannia your loyalty because you are nobody to everyone else, and she says you ought to go back to school. And you realize you want that, a semblance or a taste or a brief fantasy of a life that you lost years ago to the taking. It's whiplash, slipping out of your military-issued uniform and dressing in a black that isn't for a funeral. The school uniform sits high on your neck and feels both like a trap and a nicely stylized noose when you come face to face to a few dozen Britannians who want nothing more than for your existence to cease.

Lelouch still remembers your childish code. You meet him on the roof, sun blazing down on you both, and you feel a longing so strong that you forget how to speak. Japanese is an unmetabolized trauma in your mouth, between the two of you.

You are so used to the taking. Lelouch makes you the latest addition to the Student Council and suddenly you have your first sense of immunity, of protection.

You don't believe in saviors, much less white and pearly ones, but you have learned to count the small mercies. When Euphemia proposes a plan to reinstate a tiny shred of your heartland, you take it. You finger it where it lays, pink and weak and trembling, in the middle of her palm. Then you gobble it up; smash it into the backs of your teeth, feel the ebb of black blood gushing into the back of your throat.

It tastes bitter. It tastes of the day you ran your father through. It tastes like tomorrow.

But it does not taste like victory.

You are a Knight, though, having been made one by the grace of her hand. There must be some victory in that--to be held up over the heads of Britannian soldiers and corporals and sergeants alike with your Japanese face and Japanese blood and Japanese ways. You are a number and a knight, noble and dignified and wretched and baseborn, and you don’t know what it means to be either, truly, fully, not completely, some disgusting incomprehensible mesh of both. It doesn’t change, though: you are a lie at first sight.

 _Believe_ , Euphie tells you. 

Is it naive to believe you could have saved her, or is it naive to believe either of you could have made a speck of difference?

Either way, your naivete is not an excuse. Duty is violence, she got shot, and her blood is not yours, but it's all on you.

Your only friend wants to save you, but you don't know that yet. You look into Zero's black mask and think that if there's a human under there, you can't see them. Zero lets you walk back to your death adorned in gravel white and choked by the collar your oppressors put on you, and you have to wonder what it would have taken for Lelouch to stop you.

Did he know that you didn't want him to? 

But you do not die, and Zero does not try to save you again.

Zero tries to recruit you. You wonder if there's any difference in Lelouch's mind. You wonder, hysterically, if Lelouch is just as naive.

(Live, he tells you.

Live--

Live--

Live--)

You are seventeen. You think you hate Lelouch.

A reason: too many people dead, manipulated and smeared and cut down. Your people. Your dream. Dead where they had stood.

Another: you hate yourself more than you hate Lelouch, and he told you to--

( _Live_ \--)

Lelouch always seals off your exits, always cuts off your lifelines. Lelouch always leaves you with no choice.

You wish he were dead.

(Like--

You?)

Part of you can't believe he has what it takes to kill somebody.

But he is Lelouch. He is capable of anything he sets his mind to. What he forgets: you too are capable of horrible, hideous things.

You think on what it means to be a traitor and set out to rub out a blight on Japan's name.

You turn eighteen in a month. During that time, you sell yourself to the Emperor and become a different number. Your inauguration is international news (salt in a fresh wound). Japan is still not Japan. Euphemia is still dead. Britannia is thriving, freely exploiting. Zero is gone; you caught it, shattered its mask, and stripped Lelouch down, debased him in front of the Emperor. That was a week ago.

Lelouch remembers the you from seven years ago. (You remember pressing him down, twisting his head up, holding his eyes open. You remember his mangled scream as his father took everything that ever mattered to him away from him.

Vindication, you remember.

Vindication, you remind.

You thought--

You might--

Except--

You felt a stab of--)

You are no scapegoat, oh no. You are the last son standing. You are a cheap evil.

You are a white horror, miserable and bereft. This is your last resort. You think that you are no different from Lelouch, now.

You are eighteen. You have wanted to die since you were ten.

(It's a wicked, stupid, insane thought, but. But.) 

So: you lived long enough to lose yourself. What now, fiend? You wait, prowling through the days with undying ache. Your cruelty is a parched, twisting thing in the base of your throat. Even more so: your want, and everything you thought dead and done. Zero comes back. Japan shudders in recognition; the Emperor orders the Knights of the Round out of Britannia (a witch to be found, an insurgent to maim). The world shimmers and firms, as if from a mirage. Gino comments on your unusual energy, the heat in your face, the hysteria of your homeland, off in your blood. You strip out of your white and gold and blue and go back to school. Lelouch turns his eyes onto you for the first time in a year and suddenly wanting to die becomes secondary to wanting to run.

(Can you be friends again?)

Nunnally doesn't know. Nunnally trusts you, though, so when you tell her that her brother will join her soon, she believes you. You wonder what she would do if she ever finds out what you did to him. If they are really siblings, Nunnally would not hesitate to open her eyes and smile, beatific, and stare you dead. 

(It would be worse if she forgives you. You think she would. You don't intend to ever find out.)

Again, Lelouch remembers your child's code. It stuns you into silence no less than the first time. He laughs at your awkwardness, your face, and you feel mortally sick. Still, you want to yank him closer and whisper, like this is a secret that can be safe between the two of you: _This._ _We could have been this._

When he calls you, desperate, you are almost so glad that you scream. You want to throw up your arms and your lunch and every memory of his laugh and his smile and his love for his sister. You want to reach inside of yourself and eradicate every speck of tenderness you have for him.

You want to make him a stranger. You want him to forget: Zero, Marianne, Britannia, Japan, the empire, the horrors.

 _I killed my Father for you_ , you want to say.

 _Why couldn't you live a life of peace?_ You want to scream. _Why couldn't you leave this?_

You know, though. You know it with unerring certainty. Lelouch called you because, in the end, he is your oldest enemy, and you are his oldest friend. 

The entire Tokyo Settlement is gone. 

Wiped from the map. In the center of Japan is a crater that you made. Nunnally is dead, you assume. You don't remember; just Cecil, watching you with an unreadable face, and Lloyd, patting you on the back and handing you the list of the deceased. Missing, you read. Missing, missing, missing, missing, missing, missing, missing, missing.

Lelouch doesn't call you again.

It's funny sometimes, when you think about it--the patricidal pair you make. The massacres you've committed, the people you've murdered between you. Lelouch led a genocide; you nuked a settlement. Lelouch killed Euphemia; you killed Nunnally. Fair is fair. Parallel paths; endless reflections cast on the same mirror. Inseparable and miserable. You are his mistake as he is yours. 

YOU ARE NO BETTER THAN HIM.

YOU ARE THE SAME AS HIM.

YOU ARE.

It takes eight years for you to take his hand again. 

You are eighteen when the three of you leave for Britannia in a cargo ship. There are tombstones for them in Japan, somewhere.

You aren't a child anymore, haven't been since your enlistment and Euphemia's murder and your personal patricide and the moment you shot Zero in the face, but Lelouch still makes you feel like one. It's stupid, the way he makes you feel, but he is Lelouch, and he burns through you like the teeth on a knife. He makes you feel alive.

It’s stupid. The immortal mimes vomiting and calls them young, sickeningly so. 

Respite: running the soft flesh of Lelouch's chest through.

Grace: Lelouch, bowing his head against yours.

A form of absolution: both of you gutting the Britannian empire, restoring ancestral lands, and ending wars before they begin. 

"No more white saviors," Lelouch says, and hands you the blade's garnished hilt. Smiles, kisses your brow, murmurs his assent. There's a peace in that. 

And you realize: you believe in him again.

"Didn't I tell you," mouth against yours, hands precious over the redness of your scars, the brownness of your skin. "I would use my power for you." 

**Author's Note:**

> And is it not some kind of lovely ending? Him on his knees, you as his blade and executioner. Oh great administerer of justice. Lover of mine. Lover of him.


End file.
